Dana Milbank, Brian Beutler & Alissa Quart

Then we'll talk to the economic hardship reporting projects Alyssa Court, who will tell us about her new book Bootstrapped, Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. But first we have the Washington Post columnist, the one, the only, Dana Milbank. Welcome back to you Fast Politics, Dana Milbank. Molly, it's always a great pleasure. Thank you. Well, I'm interrupting you from watching a certain committee hearing. That's the kind of hearing that I watch and I want to throw stuff at

the wall. Tell us what committee hearing you were just watching on c SPAN. There is just so many good committee hearings going on all the time. I was like toggling back and forth among six of them this morning and now this afternoon, We're going to hear from a subcommittee of James Comer's House Oversight Committee, and they are talking about how the progressivism, basically the wokeness of the

military is preventing readiness of our troops. I love it as a topic of a hearing, but the fact that they're doing on the same day that over in the Senate, Tommy Tuberville actually is compromising the readiness of our military by refusing to approve any of the military promotions. So everybody's actually stuck in place and is in fact not ready. Yeah, You've hit on many subjects I want to talk about, but the first is James Comer. I feel like he's

new this season of Our Republican House. Fockay he is. They brought him up from Triple A. But I'm not sure he can hit these pitches. No, I'm not sure. So he's a fascinating care because, like a Louie Gomer, you look at that guy and you go, like, this guy's an idiot, right, He's got crazy eyes. Yeah, yeah, he's got crazy eyes. He sometimes loses a tooth story a conversation, which, by the way, you know, I've had many dental struggles, so I'm hardly casting aspersions here or

asparagus casting aspersions on his asparagus. I knew that's where you were, not exactly. This is a real deep cut for people. But Coomer looks normal, but then when you get him going, he sounds yeah. The best I can tell on Comer is he probably is or was normal, and then he became chairman of this committee. I mean, it's not terribly unlike the McCarthy thing. It's like, you have a choice. You can be normal or you can have a job, right, and if you want to keep

your job, you gotta at least sound crazy. And of course if you if you sound crazy long enough, well off, you know, it's just cognitive dissonance. You've just become crazy. You have to believe it, right, because he can't keep saying it. This's got a long history of people in this position, going back to Dan Burt shooting Warnermelons, and darryl Issa was in this job, and Drey Gowdy the Aghazi came out of this committee. He just doesn't seem

ready for prime time. You know, Like just a couple of weeks ago he was going after Bo Biden, who of course isn't alive to defend himself. He keeps contradicting himself on the Hunter Biden stuff. Yeah, he just doesn't seem like he's ready for prime time. And when he goes on Fox News, he seems to operate as if nobody's going to hear what he said outside the Fox News echo chamber. And he's constantly getting in trouble for those things because he's saying things that are not backed

up by reality. One of the incredible things that I think about is on the Sunday Shows, Jake Tapper interviewed him. He was so hot to defend Trump that he couldn't figure out what he was defending Trump from. So Tapper said, well, do you think business crimes are not really crimes? And he was like, no, election crimes aren't really right, you know what's like? And Capo was like, but the New York state crime would be a business. Oh, yes. You know.

I feel like we haven't spent enough of this news cycle talking about Republicans falling all over themselves to defend Donald Trump when Donald Trump has still yet to be actually indicted. Whatever you may think of Donald Trump, and I know you're a big fan, right, a big fan he's brilliant at this sort of thing. I mean, you know, I wrote about it before he had a serious run

for the presidency. He would flirt with it each time, and I noted he would do it often or at least more than once when the Apprentice was up for renewal. Then he'd starts teasing a presidential run, right, and at one of these times, I don't know whether twenty ten or something like that, I got a I wish I had kept it. I got a clip out of the article i'd written observing that from Donald Trump, in which he circled that sentence and said, good point. He was.

He was happy to be copulating NBC or whatever it was. But now he's doing the same thing to the House Republicans. He had no idea that, you know, whether or not he was going to be arrested, but he just went out and said it because you know, what, does he care? And you know, the fools, they fell for it completely, uh it. You know, So it doesn't matter if he's indicted now, or if he's not indicted, or if he's indicted in Georgia or if he's indicted in New York.

He's back on top. Yeah, he's all everybody's talking about. He's stealing all the oxygen in the room. They are tripping over themselves to interfere in the American justice system, right, weaponize the federal government, and even you know, in some of the most absurd cases, they're even actually defending his behavior with with Stormy Daniels, well the climbs or just the tortry thing that started it. You know, do you

really want to really want to be defending him on Yeah? That, Like Tucker Carlson said, come on, everybody pays hush money, right, I mean, who among us? Let me? The moment I thought was the sort of most magnificent moment of this whole experience was when Republicans were furious with de Santis for not defending Trump. Yeah. I mean that shows you know how it was so brilliant. It looked like Pence was successfully getting or at least trying to get some

distance on Trump. It looked like De santists was cutting him down quite nicely. And now everybody's back on their heels either defending him or be quiet because he's the only game in town again, and that's why many people go through this. Yo, Trump's finished now, he's he's really done. And you know, I admit it had looked that way for a little while, but just because every time in

the past he's come roaring back. I mean I was down at, you know, for his full start of a presidential announcement in Marlago, and it really felt like the guy was done. But he's Donald Trump. He'll destroy everything around him, but he's going come crawling out of that

mushroom cloud. Yeah. I mean, that is the thing that I'm so struck by, is it feels like, you know, if he were a normal candidate, I mean, if he cared about the Republican Party more than he cared about his own bottom line, then perhaps, but that has never been the case. Why would we expect it to start now the whole notion for any anybody else and forget about politics. But in the world, by and large, getting

indicted is a bad thing. Like you put that into the negative in the negatives fall when you're listing positives and negatives, all things being equal, you'd rather not be indicted. But this is the thing that I think is sort of mind blowing, is that there has been, up until Donald Trump, a certain honor among thieves and by thieves, I mean politicians that I mean, there was a certain

you know, if you lost, you would admit it. You wouldn't lie, you know what I mean, Like you might lie about whether or not you at a mistress, but you wouldn't lie about whether or not you'd lost the election. Right, Things that you would lie about, things that weren't demonstrably false that you know, you could proto shade it or people might not know the truth. But no, this is a you know, I mean, there's there's the absence of shame,

but there's also the absence of fact. You know, as we've discussed before, Trump didn't invent that it had gotten a whole lot more brazen, going back to death panels, Yeah, there was something about that war in Iraq, and then of course, you know, the Birther thing, it had gotten increasingly brazen. But now it's you know, it's it's sort

of stuff that can be disproven in real time. And the whole notion is that the people doing the disproofing, that people who are actually pointing out that it's false are the ones who have an agenda. So that was the genius here, right, I mean, it's like calling black people racist right, yeah, no, right, it's it's the proverbial jiu jitsu, and I mean the ruinous consequences of course.

So you now have the chairman of the House Administration Committee, the House Oversight and the House Judiciary Committee casting doubt on the justice system in America. Just as they made people believe that the elections are are rigged, they're making people believe that the justice system is rigged. In fact, one of the many hearings I was listening to this morning another effort just by the House Administration Committee to

say that our elections are all screwed up. This time they're going after a Republican county of Luzerne County in Pennsylvania. But doesn't matter, you know, just so doubts and say the systems that you believed in are failing you, and everybody's lying to you. Right. This sort of works until it doesn't. Right, Well, I'm still waiting for that point. Many points it seemed Trump had jumped the shark. It

keeps succeeding in the end. So you know, I agree, theoretically there is a point at which even the thirty percent or whatever of America, that sort of die hard maga will say Okay, that's too much. I can't I can't follow you there. But I haven't seen it yet, right. I continue to believe that they're in a situation where the only person who went who can win the primary is Trump and the only person who can guaranteed to

lose the general as Trump. It certainly seems that way to me, and you know, as the guy who had to you know, physically eat a column. Wait which column was that? Well, in twenty sixteen, I said Republicans are better than this. They're not going to nominate Donald Trump. Oh yeah, that's what you get for thinking they were better than that. Yeah. I had a local chef, Victor Albisu. He came into the post. I got the food critic,

Tom Seatso we had an entire spread of newspaper. They made newspaper filtered coffee, they made newspaper filet of fish, tacos. It was, and Trump wine to wash it all down. It was a great culinary experience. That's amazing. But yeah, so, but what were you saying. I'm not going to make the mistake again of saying Trump can't win or Trump can win, because who the hell knows. What I do

know is anybody out there is I doubt true. Last week, anybody's still saying it, But anybody's saying it that Trump can't be back on top again and that he couldn't win the presidency again. They're just making it up because we've seen it can happen. You know, in the long run, the politics he's practicing our ruinous to his party and to the country more importantly. But in the short term, I don't I don't doubt that it can still work.

I mean, do you think, like the thing I always think about is this idea that like you can't make a Faustian bargain and then like have people just go back to normal. There has to be some kind of reckoning. Where is the reckoning? We keep thinking, well, all right, they saw what all these you know nutters meant that the Republicans didn't win the Senate. They very narrowly won the House, went with George Santos. Yeah, right, with George Santos.

And you know, originally they were expecting a sixty seat majority and wind up with five and said, you'd think the reckoning would come after losing the twenty twenty election. Losing I think it's eight of nine president of the last presidential election popular vote. You'd think it would come after the January sixth insurrection. There's a reckoning for like a week, and then everybody just forgets that which is reckoning,

and we're right back in the same place. So I don't necessarily believe that there is a reckoning for this. I don't think they don't. I think being a maga Republican means never having to say you're sorry. I think eventually they decide they're sick of losing. The problem for them, and again this is not a problem for me, because I think they did this themselves, is that ultimately they

are being ruled by their base. So once the sort of the powers that be in the Republican Party decide they are sick of losing, they're going to have to say goodbye to the base that has delivered them, you know, I mean, there's no way to not alienate the base. I mean, that's all of this is about not alienating that sort of despicable group that no Republican had ever dare.

I mean, you know that they had quietly tried to appeal quiet lead to the sort of deplorables, and then you know, the very very small group of real people that are beyond the pale. And I do think that now they would have to reject that group by saying they don't believe in these kind of very base things, right, And how would you do that? Who would you? You know? Because of course we saw through the Fox News texts coming out from the dominion suit that that's their base. Right.

They're out there worrying that if they don't tow the extremist line, if they don't perpetuate the big lie, that they're going to lose their people to news Max or somebody else, and they will, right, How does an elected official and McCarthy a comer disown that base without the implosion of the party. There's nothing left if they were to do that. So that's why I don't know. I don't see how that reckoning comes about other than constant drubbings,

which will happen eventually, just not just not necessarily next year. Yeah, I mean, I think that's ultimately their big problem. But oh wow, they did it to themselves. I mean, and they really did do it to themselves, I mean, just in a spectacular fashion. So they're sort of in it. And I think that this is what we're seeing in this Republican House is a kind of you know, Trumpism is a sort of you have a leader who has a cult of personality, but you have no governing principles

except chaos. I mean, that's what we're seeing in the House. Hey us, Yes, I was watching and Appropriations hearing where they're talking about cybersecurity. Suddenly we're talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, and Hunter Biden. That's suddenly the topic. Here. They are having another committee, I think it's the Energy and Commerce Committee is having another hearing on censorship at Twitter. This is after the Oversight Committee had a disaster of a

hearing on it. It's after Jim Jordan's Weaponization committee, and now they're actually having some of the same witnesses back again to chew over it again at Energy and Commerce. It's you know, it's sort of it's like a fever dream of Hunter Biden, woo politics, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

It's just an endless repeat here. And then you know, in the background, you have very serious things like oh, guys were about to default on the federal debt, and you literally had the House Republican Caucus leaders out one time, and then on a split screen. You had the House Freedom Caucus this morning, and they're saying entirely different things

about what needs to happen with the debt limit. I guess the only thing that you can agree on is that Hunter Biden's laptop just keep saying it right exactly. One last question for you. It seems like this Dominion suit from what I'm seeing, you know now they want these Fox personalities to testify. I mean, I don't know if you saw the polling last week that Fox watchers are aware of of what's happening. I mean, it does seem like Dominion is a company with nothing left to lose.

Their whole brand has been savage. You see it at the local level at election board meetings and then local testimonies. That's why you file a defamation suit, because it's been ruinous to your character. I mean, I think a lot of smart people say it's it's really hard to prevail in these kinds of lawsuits. But give them credit for doing an enormous public service because maybe it is filtering to Fox fears of some extent, but the rest of the world is seeing what a connart this whole thing is.

That's just the knowingly feeding your audience lies over and over again, even though you know it's wrong, even though that people in the news division of your own organization are fighting you. Yeah, it's crazy. Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back. It was a delight Thank you, Mollie. Brian Boittler is the editor in chief of Crooked Media. Welcome to Fast Politics, Brian, thank you for having me up. We're delighted. Our first topic of conversation must be a

meat ball ron. Here we are in a situation where we have this Republican that all the kind of smart Republicans have decided is their candidate right. He may lack charisma, but they don't care. And then we have the probably likely Republican candidate who is going to eat him. Is

that fair? I think so. I mean, I think that you see in a lot of the recent coverage of this sort of shadow campaign, the problems that the santiss is going to have, which are really familiar because all of the twenty sixteen primary candidates who tried to take on Trump had the same problem, and that Donald Trump doesn't have this particular problem, and you know, it's one of the only admirable things about Donald Trump's, at least to me, it's not in how he does it, but

that he's willing to do it. Is that when he identifies an opponent, even if it's a Republican opponent, and he wants to beat him, he just screams to the eye heavens, but that person is beyond redemp just terrible in all kinds of ways. Right when he puts out statements about the Santists, they're withering. On the other hand, when the Santists punches at Donald Trump, you'll get the New York Post talking about how the gloves are finally

coming off. But when you read the actual comments, it's so tame and oblique, and he's just unwilling to confront Donald Trump directly or say anything really very critical about him. And it's hard to see how that's gonna lead him to the nomination. Unlast, like Donald Trump gets in prisoned or something. I even think Donald Trump running from prison

could probably still beat Roun de Santis. I don't want to say this again because the last time I said this, I got in trouble with actual members of the Dacaucus family. And look, there are a lot of great things about Decacus but he was not a brilliant political strategist, and

he also had a very sort of slightly run to santasy. Look, there's a line from the tank image of Dacocus to John Kerry saying reporting for duty and saluting at the two thousand and four convention to meet ball Ron pretend to flying in a plane and acting like he's top gun Maverick. It's all one piece, right, and it's really corny.

And people think think that people like that are dorks and don't like them, right, And I mean I think also like there's a real disconnect here between what Americans have since in my incredibly long lifetime, because I'm incredibly old, I have always elected charismatic leaders, often to their detriment, right, I mean, look, how many times do I remember people being like, you can't elect this guy. With the exception of WA's dad, I think largely Republicans, Democrats, everyone has

elected people they find charismatic. I think that's right. I mean I think that at least in my also too long of a lifetime, every presidential election has been won by the more charismatic of the two candidas. And I feel like every time I end up in a conversation about this, some part of the Rick gets upset because they liked the losing candidate, and in their mind there was some element. You know, it's not like Hillary Clinton

lacks all charm in certain context, She's very charming. She doesn't attract cameras the way Donald Trump does, obviously, right, And I think it's the same thing was true between Gore and Bush, and the same thing was true between the first Bush and Clinton. And if it weren't for the fact that Donald Trump had gotten hundreds of thousands of Americans killed and sank the economy in his last year in office, I think Joe Biden would have had

a hard time beating him for the same reason. Even though Joe Biden has a sort of like I grew up in the nineteen fifties, like oh shucks, I'm gonna beat up the bullies persona, he doesn't command the cameras the way Trump does, and I think absent those sort of extraordinary circumstances, he might have lost two. And you know, it's not like he won by a huge landslide either. I mean, the only reason this is relevant is that

it looks like they're heading towards a rematch. But I think with Biden there was a sense that they found the kind least, you know, they found a Democrat who could be palatable to a wide range of Republicans. Right. So, I've been on television panels where people were conservatives have said Joe Biden is a socialist, but they get laughed off the panel because the guy is like the most centrist guy on the entire phase of the earth. So

I mean, and you know, he's a white guy. I mean he reads like old white guy, which you know, I think to a certain I mean, there was a certain sense. And again who knows if this is real or if this was imagined. In the mind of many of Democrats, including myself, was this sense that like America was not ready to elect a woman, they really, you know, for whatever reason, they needed an old white guy, and

we found them an old white guy. Biden has a couple of assets, and you alluded to one of them, I think, I mean, on top of being an old white guy. The Santis said something really strange the other day, or wrote something really strange where he said, geographically, I'm from Tallahassee, but spirit I come from the Midwalk, come from the Ohio, Pennsylvania partment, you know what I mean, states that I need to win, Yeah, exactly. And the and the and the thing is that Joe Biden actually

does right, like that's his actual heritage. And then the other thing he's got going for him is this is Biden I'm talking about again, is that something like fifty five to sixty percent of the country just absolutely despised Donald trum like they are. I mean, that faction has been there since about twenty fifteen, and everything about his

presidency just intensified that distastet antimpathy. And it's really hard for somebody who has to work with a maximum of forty or forty five percent of the electorate to win an election. Naturally, even with the electoral college, it can be done. And that's why it's a it's still a

scary situation. But he's so toxic for so many reasons that even Joe Biden, you know, with some of the challenges he will have going into reelection, he'll be an incumbent running against somebody who's widely, widely loathed in the country, and that's our hope. Yeah, exactly. But it is a totally fascinating phenomenon So first, let's talk about this. And I wrote about this this I'm going to get jailed and perp walked news cycle that has yet to materialize, right,

I mean it's crazy. Look, I know there were machinations from Alvin Bragg's office, and he did go on television and say but ultimately that was it, right, I mean largely, And even like two hours after Trump went on the ironically named truth social his spokesman was like, he's not really going on anything. Yeah, I mean, I still don't know what happened, and I'm not sure we ever will. There are definitely ways that Donald Trump could have gotten wind of a looming indictment, even if he got the

date wrong, right. Like, one thing that they did that was suspicious to me is they immediately started hinting the quote unquote news that he was going to be indicted to an illegal leak from the grand jury, And just knowing the way that faction operates is that when they say something like that, they're projecting. And so there could be a grand juror who got word to them that

an indictment is indeed coming. It could have been communication between the prosecutor's office and Trump's legal team to tell him to be prepared for this in the coming several days or something like that, and then in the game of operator Trump turned it into Tuesday, I'm going to

get arrested. It hasn't happened, and maybe it won't, and if it doesn't, we're going to be left to wonder unless Alvin Bragg speaks up and explains himself whether Trump successfully intimidated his way out of an indictment, because ever since he said that, he's been essentially trying to incite the same kind of violence we saw in January six, twenty twenty one, against Alvin Bragg and the Manhattan Prosecutor's office.

So there have been death threats and you know, a fake anthrax scare or some sort of poison powder scare, or they've had to erect security fencing around it. Trump has threatened blood in the streets if he's indicted, and he then held a rally in Waco, Texas, which is sort of like waving red flag in front of the bull of militia type Trump supporters who would happily take

up arms to defend him if they could. There's this ridiculous aspect to it, like there always is with Trump just camp and just bullshit, and we can kind of laugh about it and misspellings in his truth social pseudo tweets,

and then there's this like undercurrent of real menace. And it's a little bit dispiriting that I think that we're treating it as all kind of like, let's roll our eyes at Donald Trump for being a clown again, instead of sort of preparing for the kind of public resistance push that you see happening like in Israel right now. When there's like a frontal direct threat to rule of

law in other countries, there's an immediate backlash. And I think that we're so sensitized to Trump behaving this way that we no longer interpreted as a literal direct threat to our ability as a people to hold correct public officials accountable for anything. It's a problem. The one thing I will push back on here, and I think you're certainly right, is that Trump is a real threat democracy. Is that I truly believe Ron de Santis is a

bigger threat to democracy. I mean, look, the Republican Party is not a party of democracy anymore. We had somebody on the podcast recently who talked about going to a federalist society event where the federalist society is not completely sold on democracy anymore. You know, you're seeing this again and again. Republican electeds. They want they want public schools gone, they want they want government gone. This world that we've been in all this time of democracy and government, they've

kind of turned against it. So in my mind, the only good news here is that they're going to nominate Trump, because I think that DeSantis is a much scarier candidate. I go back and for I mean, I'm not sure I agree or know who'd be worse. De Santis is competent in a way that Trump is absolutely not. Well, so what is true is that Donald Trump, I don't think, is any more philosophically supportive of or opposed to democracy

than he is anything else. Right, whatever the principle is, as soon as it stands in the way of his power and his wealth, it's got to go. And for the last seven years that principle has been democratic forces that don't want him to be in charge, or that if he is in charge, you're going to push back

on the kinds of things he wants to do. Round de Santis, if you read his first book, he is philosophically opposed to democracy the way a lot of right wing libertarians are, in that he thinks that when people have the power to elect representatives, and those representatives have the power through bare majorities, to pass laws and to govern, that there's gonna be too much distribution of wealth down the income scale, and that's a huge injustice, and so

we need to have less democracy to prevent that from happening. And you can see in the way he governs Florida that when he has power and consolidated power with the loyal legislature, he can backslide democracy really fast. Yeah, so isn't that worse. On the one hand, if you if you just look at like what Trump and DeSantis did around elections or whatever. Donald Trump are in this sort of clown judicial farce trying to get an election overturned.

Ron status actually put citizens who live in Florida in jail for voting. When the law was uncleared, they were totally were allowed to vote, and he set up a whole unit to go hunt them down and turn them into scapegoats. I don't think Trump ever did that. On the other hand, Trump did jail and separate families at the border, even though in the borders I could, yeah, but de Santis would have done that too. I mean, bad to immigrants is the brand. I think DeSantis is

scarier to the extent that he's scary. It's that he's just less easily distracted. He speaks the language of official Republicanism, so they will do what he wants. And you could imagine him if he were to come into power with a trifect of being worse than Trump. But Trump just makes people ruler. He makes people nasty in a way that has these sort of unintended and hard to define consequences, Like American society is a meaner place now than it

was in twenty fifteen. And I don't know if DeSantis has the power to galvanize people in that way, right, I mean, he's maybe not as popular, I would say.

The one thing that really strikes me. You know, I've had Sarah Longwell on this podcast, and she made the argument that by reelecting Trump, that that act is so incredibly i want to say, perverse, and such an affront to democracy that by doing that, you have actually lessened the power of the American government, and you have you stuck your finger in the eye of the American system, and I think that that percentage of the base that has taken over the party doesn't necessarily think about the

consequences of democracy. They just like their guy. So here

is the word enervating. I think that if Donald Trump would win again, particularly if he were to win again without a popular vote majority, there would not be a second resistance movement like we saw take shape in early twenty seventeen or late twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, just because I think that once the shock of it wore off, the fact that this we would be living through a repeat, that people could do everything right in the face of a threat to civic life in America, like Donald Trump

beat him twice in the popular vote, only for him to get elected twice. I guess he beat him three times in the popular vote, but still he got elected twice. That people would feel like rallying in the streets and striking and using whatever power they have as a collected

mass just wasn't worth it. It didn't wouldn't do anything, And I'd sort of worry about what like reconstituted Republican majority could get away with in a climate where people who have been exhausting themselves for the last seven years trying to push back on authoritarian authoritarianism in the US just kind of said enough, like we tried, and the system is just set up for us to fail. Yeah, I don't think so. I think people will be furious. Oh,

I agree, they'd be furious. I just don't know that if we'd see like a mass repeat of you know, when everyone was sort of taken by surprise, I mean,

who knows. And hopefully we'll never get there. But I do think, I mean, we are all hostage to this Republican Party's base, which is It's funny because it's like from someone who came from such a liberal family, and you know, I had this communist grandfather who would always say, like, you know, it's the Koch brothers who are cooking the books and cooking the elections, and they're you know, the Bushes and the Koch brothers, and they are out of

power in a certain way. It's true. Look, I'd love to be wrong that there's a chance that Trump becomes president again. If I'm not wrong about that, I'd love to be wrong that he would not be met with such fierce pushback as he was when he won the first time. As you said, hopefully we'll never live to see either of those things. But I do worry. I mean, I think that there's a lot of people out there watching Trump not get charged with crimes he committed around

the election stealing classified documents. He got away with shaking down Ukraine, he got away with cooperating with Russia in the twenty sixteen election. And the one thing he didn't get away with was stealing the election. But he tried, and he's not being charged for that either. And so it's just like what good is showing up in the street and like making our opposition to what he's up to heard, when at the end of the day, it doesn't actually work. Thank you, Brian, all right, thank you

so much for having me. Alyssa Court is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of Bootstraft, Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream Welcome Too Fast Politics, Alyssa Court. Oh, thank you very much. Molly. I want to call you Malls. You can call me whatever you want. A list, okay, our long time friends. So I want to talk to you first, tell us what the name of it. I don't want to Butcher the name. This is my first goal, do no evil

to the English language. So explain to us what your organization is called and what it does. Okay, so it's called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. And for a while I was like, we need to call this, you know, the Opportunity Writing World or something, you know, incredibly optimistic neoliberal name. But I actually think it's good that it's truth in advertising Economic Hardship Reporting Project. It's exactly what

we do. It's a media nonprofit. More than a third of our contributors are financially struggling, and it was created by Barbara raw Reich. The late Great Barbara Erreich just explained us a little bit. The idea was to like get reporting from about economic hardship from people who are actually experiencing economic hardship. Am I right, Yeah, I mean some of it is about that by people who work, does you know, domestic workers and adjuncts and factory workers

and experienced homelessness. Right, So that's by me thirty seven percent or so of our contributors, and then the rest are sort of midlisters, I say, like people who would otherwise probably be unable to afford to write long form journalism about inequality. But other than that, they're you know, they've got us sort of middle class journalism, independent journalism practice going, right. That's like the majority of the people who write for us, And they also take photos and

they make films and de illustration. So I want to ask you a little bit about Barbara Aaron Right, if you just want to say like a minute or two about Barbara Aaron Right. She just died. She was pretty much one of the great writers on this topic. Would you just like give us like a two second for those of us who are not completely writ in on the history of Barbara Arnwright, a little bit about her legacy. Yeah. So,

Barbara Aaron Reich wrote twenty one books. She was one of the first people to write about did wives and whiches. She wrote about cancer culture and the way that women's illness is commercialized, and she wrote about poverty and labor and that's what she's most famous for. But she was really a wild, wonderful mind and reporter and social critic, and I was very close to her. So I was very sad when she died. And we had worked together

very closely for almost a decade on this project. Which is sort of like, if you think of it, like the Marshall Project does for the penal system, the prison system, what this Hardship Project does for poverty. I think that's fair, right, yeah, completely or inequality, because yeah, in a quantity. The reason I make that distinction is I think we need to talk about financial struggle like up and down the gradient.

I mean, not all the way up, but not all the up existed for a reason, right, I mean there are people who are financially struggling who are making forty thousand dollars in American cities, right right, right, right, No, I think that's a really good point. So now I want to talk to you about the book which is called Bootstrapped, Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. A little bit counterintuitive, right yeah, because I see the American Dream.

First of all, I see it is something is different than what is now understood to be the American Dream. When it was coined in nineteen thirty one, it meant something more capacious, it meant something more collective the original definition of it, and it's become over time. And I do this with many different terms that have to do with being self made or self actualized in this country,

it's become bastardized. Its meaning has been in since lost, and it's just all about financial success and gain and doing it all on our own. So I'm trying to take that back, take the collective meaning of things like

the American dream back. So explained to me a little bit about what the lie of the American dream is, right, Well, the American dream is you're going to be able to make it just out of hard work on your own, no matter what strata, and you're born to and all you have to do is you know, nowadays it's hustle or rise and grind and your thrive and prosper. And

it's wrong on so many levels. It's wrong in terms of, you know, what people know about mobility and what it takes to survive in terms of medical care and you know, getting educated. And also it's wrong in terms of the fact that we have to do it alone because everything, as I write in the book, is everyone and everything is dependent on something and someone else. And that's one of the great ways that the American dream has been distorted. That's somehow we're supposed to do this either on our

own or just with our little families without help. I mean, in some ways it's not unlike and again this has been widely made fun of, but it's true. I want to bring it up because I think it's really, really true. You know, Hillary Clinton talking about how it's hard to raise a child alone. Yeah, it takes a village. I was trying with this book, honestly, to find language that was less corny, right, you know, I mean I think

the village. You're like, oh gosh, it's also appropriative. It been aged well as a phrase, but I think the meaning of it aged well. I mean, I think the

meaning it's more truth than ever. It takes a village, you know, in the pandemic, we saw that on a grand scale, right, yeah, I mean that was my thinking is like the lie of this is this idea that a lot of people are self made, when in fact they come from wealthy families, or not wealthy families, but families that were very upper middle class and would basically wealthy. They came from families where parents were able, where grandparents were able to give them money to start their businesses.

I mean, so many of these stories are like with a mere ten thousand dollars loan, and I was able to you know, and if you think about things like that statistic where you see that the average black family has so much less money on hand than the average white family, I mean you see the sort of vestiges of slavery in the To me continuing, yeah, I mean, fewer than half of the American adults, like something like forty seven percent say they have enough emergency funds to

cover three months of expenses. And that this was in twenty twenty. And the mobility numbers the same as study is that you know, you had a ninety two percent chance if you're born in the forties of sort of meeting or exceeding your parents earnings and stature, and if you're born in the eighties, you had a fifty percent chance. So just sheer mobility, you know, across it's gone down.

I would love you to just talk a little bit about that more because I think that's the largest complaint that we see that I certainly see, is this idea that you can't move in this world anymore. Yeah, I mean, you know, intergenerational mobility is so much greater now in countries that we would have expected there to be more limited mobilic We think of America again, This is part of the American dream as a place where you can change where you're born, but that doesn't turn out to

be the k in many instances. And I mean part of what I tried to do in this book is also talk to people for whom that was true, because I think it's really important for me. It's like real people, right, like what's going on, what do they want to be and what has held them back? And tell us like what their budget is, you know, what's their day like. And that to me was it's always helpful to kind of wrap your arms around what ordinary people's experiences. Yeah,

I think that's really interesting. So tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean I talk to someone who had to use a Go fund Me campaign to raise money for he had renal failure. He was in dialysis, right, And that's a very common story people needing to make to raise money for their their medical bills. Right. Yeah, it's one of the largest sectors of Go fund Me. I mean, it's like a go fund me has become

a social service provider, right, which is totally nuts. This guy did this and so he could kind of pay for ubers and stuff to get ambulance to get to the facility and also to like not only do his medical care, but fix his car and pay for help pay for the small apartment he and his mother's share, and he's on disability. I also talked to another person who had go fund me to raise money for school lunches because extremely poor kids were able to get school

lunches without this thing called lunch shaming. I don't know if you've heard about this, where they stamp something on the kid's hands if their bills are unpaid. But in this community, these were working class people, so they may just the parents may just a little too much for the school lunches to be fully subsidized. And so this lunch shaming was happening, and this woman is in Montana had to create a whole go fund me to pay for school lunches in her in her district. But you know,

I hope it isn't just depressing this book Bootstrapped. It's it's also filled with stories about people do overcome, but they almost always overcome through working with others, Like it's not just going to be this boot strapping myth that that's getting them by, So that that's sort of the point. What would you say, if you were to say that the sort of secret is here, of like, if you were to tell us what the lie was, the lie

of the American Dream, what is it? Well, some of it is in the very origins of the people who wrote some of the great texts of the American Dream. And I'm thinking you're Horatio Alger. Yeah, you've heard the phrase Horatio Alger story, right, Yeah, explain to us what that is and who that is and how he's relevant. Yeah, So Horatio Alger story. I mean, look, Trump talked about his father having a Ratio Alger story, like no, but Michael Moore said, the Ratio Alger story was like the

drug of our country. You know, people use it casually all the time. But when I read the books, I saw that the lie there was. First all, the Horatio Alger story was always about they were novels. They were really really bad novels. You wrote over a hundred of them, wildly popular, and they always have this like handsome, very young man, like teenager selling peddling ties or hats or like kind of like a stock boy. And then he always meets of a rich old man. And that is

the Horatio Alger story. And this rich old man helps him. So basically it's a totally homosocial classic story, like it's something out of the Victoria novel, except it would be a marriage, right, or like a rich guy marries because they can't be honest about the way power works, like an old man who's probably whatever quite taken with these teenagers, right, these real teenagers. Instead, it becomes a story of hard work,

pluck and luck was the phrase they used. And so it's like the Horash Algier story itself was a lie. And then Horatio Alger was a pedophile, and so you know, this Horatio Alger prize was something that Clarence Thomas was into. The Ratio Alger society re again was into it, I mean, and I was like, do they know that Harrash Alger is a man who has chased out of the church because a minister for a sailing to boys. Wow? Yeah, So the lesson here is if a rich guy is

coming to help you, he might have another motive. Yeah. Is that fair? That's a fair assumption. Yeah. So your thesis is that we need to move more towards community and less towards a strange rich guy who gives you money and then might want something in return, Yes, exactly, a strangers guy who gives you money or takes up your time. We've seen in the last ten years in particular, where that leads us. How do we as a culture

start to get healthier. It's funny. A lot of books, right, Molly, have like chapter at the end where you're like, this is my solutions chapters. Right. I fell in love with these solutions and they became the sort of meat of the book. And some of them are kind of personal, like things we can do within ourselves and in our lives. Some of them are who we vote forward, who we're bringing in as political leaders, and some of them are like mutual aid and workers cooperatives and kind of I

guess spinachy solutions, but they're real. You know, there are things that are happening now that are on the rise, something called participatory budgeting, where people in cities are now increasingly citizens increasingly talking about how their local city budgets are spent. And you can do this if you're in New York, if in your Seattle, you can join this thing.

It's called PV. And you know, there's found a bunch of maybe five more of these kind of things, But the personal part of it was something that I had started trying to do, almost like a mantra, which is saying who helped me? Who made me who I am? What forces have gone into everything, even this book, you know, And but in my life, like what is helping me? Instead of being like grateful in this kind of hashtag grateful way that doesn't seem to really go anywhere. It

can be kind of deeply individualistic too. I feel like attributing is more of an important thing to do in one's life, right. I think that's a really good point. I mean, I know, for me, I got sober when I was nineteen, and one of the things that I saw in my own life was that you really can't get sober with that our community, right, Like I got to burn a twelve star program, which I continue to be in today, an anonymous program, but we won't worry

about that. I think that there really is a sense that a lot of the community that saves us is not part of the American ideology absolutely. I mean, there is, of course this alternative American story that does stress community. And I mean some of it's related to the church, but some of it's think and like barn raising and you know that kind of thing. But some of it is the history of mutual aid, which you know what mutual aids are, right, Can you talk about that for

a minute. Sure, So mutual aids, especially during the pandemic, became really popular. If you live in a city, you may have seen, you know, or anywhere, you may have seen signs or like oh, come, you know, bringing groceries to your elderly neighbor, you know, and people would just do that, and just many sprouted up, like immediately after the lockdown started, and I looked into a few and hung out with some of the people who work in

the global one in my neighborhood. And so that mutual aid, though, that structure where people help each other thought a charity because maybe it is a little like your twelve step program. Each person's helping each other, even though it may go one way. Mostly where the elderly neighbors are the ones mostly being helped supposedly, right, the person who's bringing that food in those medications or whatever can get that themselves

too if they need it. So that rearranges charity, so it's not just like top down where you have some you know, noddle person benefactor rolling out soup. But you have people really on the ground helping each other. And it turned out what I looked into the mutual aids were popular in the nineteenth century, but it was all almost on the black community, and that was a history that I was like, verities to be a hidden figure about this, you know, if it had figures seriously, right, Yeah,

this is incredible. They're all over the South and even in California. I found that really interesting and inspiring and that this was an alternative American dream that again we fard to little about. Yeah, I'll say, I mean, that's really interesting. So, Alyssa, if you have one last sort of line, a sort of selling line for the book, tell us why people need to read this book? Well, can I give you two? Yeah, you can give me ten. Yeah, all right, Well you can't give me ten, but you

can give me two. Well, one thing that I'm trying to teach people about is what I call the art of dependence, and that it dependence is something that can be a craft and a skill and an ability and something we should cherish and we shouldn't just be trying to be independent all the time and muscling through and siloed in our families. But that dependence is actually something

to be honored and dependence pride, if you will. And that's kind of the through line of this book, like let's stop this Horatio Alger story which was allied to begin with, and you know, let's praise the ways that we need help from other people and the ways that we give help. So that's one thesis and then the others that we have to go into the past to

get to the future. And what I mean by that is that we actually had, as I said, this alternative American dream that existed in different forms, that existed in these mutual aids and workers' co ops in the black community in the nineteenth century and some of the early twentieth, and then it existed in the Homestead Act in eighteen sixty two, which was the biggest land giveaway in American history.

And that is that was a complete kind of moment of beneficence right from the state and people were getting things for free. Right. People have conveniently forgotten that the same the same people who are saying, oh, you please don't get college debt relief right, their families probably benefited from the Homestead act right the GI bill, we're returning veterans after World War Two would get housing and education. Like, I think we need to look to some of these

earlier forms of what the American dream meant and reclaim them. Yeah, so interesting, Thank you so much. Let's accord. Oh, you're so welcome all Molly Jung Fast Jesse Cannon. That Rick Scott, he's still fighting to be the thought leader of the Republican Party, which you would think would be an easy race to win, but he still fails at it. A lot of quotes around thought and leader. This is not a visual medium, but if there was, if you could

see me quote treating like mad. Yes, let me just say Rick Scott wants the death penalty for school shooting because how better to prevent killing than with more killing? Yes, especially when most of the people who do these shootings have a suicide mission and they want to die during it really is going to help the turret right exactly. Again, Let's never deal with the AR fifteenth. Let's never deal with the gun that's used in all the mass shootings.

Let's deal with everything else. Stupid, but what we should expect from a politician from the Great State of Florida. That's not true. There are some very smart politicians in Florida, like our friend Maxwell Frost, friend of the pod, but dear God, they are not sending their best that Republican Party. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds

in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.